“Well, all the best artists are a little twisted, mate.”

I thought that I would give this one another go before the sequel comes out this upcoming week. On my first viewing back in the summer of last year, I was very new and still relatively unfamiliar with the Mortal Kombat IP, but the series has since become one of my favorite video game franchises and one of the only series that I still consistently play. With that in mind, I had no idea whether or not I would enjoy this movie more, less, or the same as I did before, and thankfully, I actually did like it more this time around, though not really because I was more familiar with the franchise as a whole.

To start things off, the action sequences as well as the gore are quite literally everything you would want from a Mortal Kombat movie, even if this movie isn’t as full of them as one might hope. It’s incredibly gnarly, just as much as the modern games, which makes for some seriously brutal fights and deaths throughout the course of the runtime. Every character gets at least one moment to really shine and show off their set of action skills, just like from the games, and they really are a joy to watch when they do happen.

The worldbuilding is quite subtle for this first entry, but also quite effective at the same time. You don’t get to see everything when it comes to the realms, but for what you do get, it’s pretty safe to say that it’s awesome and definitely makes a sequel feel both wanted and necessary, while also giving you just enough in this one to satisfy. The world of Mortal Kombat is also brought to life with visual effects quite nicely, even if the CGI as a whole is a bit spotty.

I think the creators of this film also did a really good job of translating these beloved characters to the big screen, something I found not really to be the case with the Mortal Kombat movie from the 1990s. Jax, Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, Sub-Zero, and Kano were all done to perfection in my opinion, while Scorpion and Raiden were also done nicely too, just a bit different (at least as far as I can tell) from their video game counterparts. Really, the only character that I think they could have done a better job with was Kung Lao, who I found to be heavily underutilized here.

For the mixed, it is definitely the CGI. The vast majority of it is really good, especially when it comes to the worldbuilding side of things, but there are definitely some moments where it can be a bit lackluster. The most obvious example is definitely a certain CGI creature that really comes into play in the back half of the movie, one whom I won’t give away because I’m not sure if this character was really present in the marketing or not. As I said earlier, the gore is done really well and easily gives you everything you could want from an onscreen Mortal Kombat adaptation, but there are also a couple of moments, unfortunately, where the visuals are subpar at best. The reason I put the CGI in the mixed section of my review, however, is that I don’t really find it to be bad or even mediocre enough to really taint my experience or enjoyment of the movie as a whole, really at all.

The biggest and most glaring issue with this movie is that it definitely feels like one big setup. For those who don’t know, I’m not going to spoil the main criticism that most Mortal Kombat fans have with this movie, but where it ultimately ends definitely makes it feel “incomplete” as an adaptation (hopefully those who have watched the movie know what I mean). This is most evident with the middle being composed of a bunch of cliché training sequences and mediocre pacing. It seems that they are finally going to fix this criticism with the upcoming Mortal Kombat II, but for this first entry on its own, you can really tell that the creators were kind of just trying out things while saving their best ideas for the sequel. I expect the sequel to be far superior to this movie, but one big thing that has pretty much become an unspoken rule for not only filmmakers, but storytellers at this point is not to save your best ideas for future entries. Do the absolute best you can with the first one, and try to improve as much as you can with the follow-up.

The other thing that a lot of people also don’t like about Mortal Kombat, which doesn’t necessarily bother me as much, but I still find a bit of an interesting creative decision, is the fact that the main character is an entirely made-up character not present in any of the games. We follow Cole Young, a struggling MMA fighter who is unaware of his heritage until he finds himself caught in the greatest tournament in the universe, Mortal Kombat, of course. It was obviously just kind of a bad idea to begin with to make the main character someone unrelated to the games, but what makes it even worse, unfortunately, is that he’s really not that interesting at all. Who knows, maybe he would have been a decent protagonist in a different movie, but with all of these far more interesting characters surrounding him throughout, it’s really hard to care or really give much attention to him. What actually makes this funny is that the filmmakers seem to really have taken this criticism to heart, as he’s barely, and to the best that I can see, not even present at all in any of the marketing for Mortal Kombat II whatsoever. This is kind of off topic in a way, but I think it would be hilarious if his character was either just not in the sequel much at all, or got killed off right at the very beginning, to which I presume the former will more likely happen with how the first one ends and with Johnny Cage being brought in for part two, who looks to be the central protagonist.

At the end of the day, 2021’s Mortal Kombat definitely seems like a very average movie at best, but I still think it provides some really good entertainment overall, and I have to say I really do enjoy it quite a bit. It’s obviously very shallow in the storytelling department, but it mostly makes up for it with some pretty stellar action sequences and an honestly fantastic first act and ending. I have to say, the first act is so good that it actually almost tricked me into thinking that this movie was even better than it actually is. Hopefully, Mortal Kombat II is a major improvement over this, which thankfully seems to be the case from both the marketing and first reactions.